"Ghost in the Fire" – Krypton S02E02

Well, I spent a fair amount of last episode's review wondering who the heck Krypton is aimed at. Now that's out of the way, I can get down to just reviewing the episodes. Sort of.

This week's "Ghost in the Fire" focuses on four storylines. Seg and Adam versus Lobo, Lyta dealing with the missing Zod, Nyssa in her new role as a traitor, and Jayna as... whatever the heck they're doing with Jayna.

The most entertaining of the four is the Seg/Adam/Lobo plot. I've never found Lobo in the comics to be that thrilling or distinctive a presence. He was introduced at DC during their 90s "grim and gritty " phase, when he was intended as a parody but DC soon realized that they had a good thing going by doing him seriously. I've always found him more annoying than anything. Then again, I find Deadpool annoying, too. Maybe because the writers often seem to be trying too hard to make them funny, and marketable in the process. Anyone remember Lobocop?

And the over-the-top humor is still there in Krypton. But it's a show that needs some comic relief. Adam (and the as-yet-absent Kem) have their moments. And Seg gets off the occasional wisecrack. But Nyssa, and Lyta, and Zod, and Dev-Em, and Jax, are all grim, grim, grim. Since we don’t expect Kryptonians to be barrels of laughs, that means the creative team needs outsiders. Kem and Seg are kind of outsiders, and Adam is an Earthling. So they brought in Lobo.

Emmett J. Scanlan does a tolerable job as Lobo. His UK accent is a little off-putting (Scanlan is Irish by birth) and he primarily appears in UK productions. Although he was in American TV, too: anyone remember him as Jim Corrigan on Constantine? One has to admire his performance: he's not quite as over-the-top as the comic book Lobo, but he still brings in a fair amount of humor.

As for the rest of that storyline, Brainiac is dead but has apparently transferred his consciousness into Seg. This causes Seg to rattle off Spock-like precise calculations, fight with enough strength and skill to match Lobo, and get black eyes. Seg and Adam escape Lobo, and Seg tells Adam to kill him rather than let him (and Brainiac) return to Krypton.

I don't know what is up with Lyta, and I'm finding it hard to care. That's what you get when you switch sides. She starts mistaking a Seg-looking Sagitari trainee named Lon-Dar (Toby-Alexander Smith) as Seg. When she talks to Lon-Dar privately, he puts the moves on her as one does with one's commanding officer. Lyta refuses his advances and then beats him unconscious. Okay, there is a little bit of Zod humor later when Zod comments Lon-Dar will recover. After making sure Lyta doesn't plan to visit him.

Lyta is feeling the angst of the world of Krypton she knows being destroyed. Zod shows her Cor and we're reminded that Seg sacrificed himself. Which Zod is playing up as some big sacrifice for the future of Krypton. Zod has Lyta hold baby Cor and I guess everything is better for her.

Nyssa joins the Resistance on the moon of Wegthor. But she's secretly working for Zod, feeding them false information to presumably lure them into a trap. She reunites with Val and Jax, gives them some information about how Zod is using the communications disruption caused by solar flares to ship troops and supplies, and then contacts Zod and tells him everything is going according to his plan.

The last storyline is the Jayna bit. She walks around the Outlands with her brother, Vidar (Faisal Mohammed). They talk about the legend of Krypton's rebirth, travel back to the city, Vidar disappears as we realize he's Jayna's hallucination, and she goes to a bar. After a very brief fight with a bouncer, and a slightly longer fight with some Sagitari looking for her, Jayna takes all of them down but one. Dev-Em (Aaron Pierre) finishes him off.

Dev-Em was such a non-presence in season one that it's hard to remember what his part is in anything that's going on. He was a Sagitari, and I guess now he's on the outs with the current Zod regime. Dev was loyal to Jayna and still is. He had a crush on Lyta, but she loved Seg. So what Dev will do, presumably working with Jayna, remains to be seen.

The Jayna/Dev plot is the most under-developed and uninteresting of the four plots this week. Mainly because the creative team hasn't done a lot to get us rooting for Jayna. This week she does promise not to keep abusing Lyta like her father abused her. But Lyta has already pretty much turned to the dark side. It seems like Seg (who she still has feelings for, going by this week) would be more likely to get through to her than her abusive mother.

Oh, Doomsday also shows up briefly to kill a couple of Sagitari skimmer pilots.

The Seg/Brainiac/Lobo/Adam plot is the most interesting of the four. Because Seg is the protagonist, because Lobo has a personality, Adam has a personality, and Brainiac has made a decent villain. And as predicted last week, Seg turning Brainiac's head into a "canoe" (as Adam so eloquently put it last episode) didn't kill him. I'm also liking Seg more this year, than last season when he came across more as a loveable rogue and/or pretty boy whose family has fallen on hard times. Maybe it's the beard. I could see him coming back to Krypton and leading the Resistance, convincing Lyta to switch sides. With Adam, Lyta, Nyssa, Val, and Jax at his side, Seg would make a formidable force.

Although you have to wonder why. That's the problem with a show that takes place a couple of generations before the present. There's not a lot of stakes, and it all ends in tears when Krypton blows up and Kal-El gets rocketed to Earth to become Superman. Adam knows that's what happens, but nobody on Krypton seems concerned about how their planet is going to blow up in a generation or two and they'll still be extinct. I don't expect them to don sackcloth and go into mourning for the next few decades, but it doesn't seem to have any bearing on what anyone is doing.

The irony of the show is Zod is saving Krypton. Sort of. I don’t recall if they've mentioned in the "new" timeline, Krypton in the present is still around, or if Zod got the majority of the population off-planet to participate in his galactic conquest. But it's odd to be rooting for Zod to save the Kryptonians... while at the same time knowing if the heroes beat him, Krypton will blow up and they, or their descendants, will die. But Superman's future is saved.

Ditto with Brainiac. Yes, we want him to be permanently dead. But he can't be. Even if Brainiac's permanent death wouldn't destroy his future/Superman's 2019 present, it would mean the alternate timeline future where Adam saw his hometown in one of Brainiac's "bubbles" couldn't exist.

The best bet is probably to ignore it and just cheer for the good guys to beat the bad guys. Krypton is an odd mix of pre-Superman history, time travel, and Superman elements like Zod, Brainiac, Doomsday, and Lobo. Rather than dissect it, I guess we're just supposed to relax and enjoy it for what it is. Whatever that is.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?